The Portland Tech Diversity Pledge

Portland’s technology community has much to celebrate; however, when it comes to having an inclusive and diverse industry we must improve. Diversifying our workforce to include all from our community is the right thing to do, and the data shows it benefits us in terms of innovation, team functioning, and bottom line results.

The undersigned believe it is necessary to do more than just talk about the need for a more diverse tech sector. We believe collective action and accountability are required to address the underrepresentation of women and people of color in our industry. Given our industry’s history of tackling profound challenges, we believe we must tackle this challenge, too. Therefore, each of us has agreed to cultivate cultures of inclusion and create a plan for increasing diversity in our organizations.

The actions being taken by the participating pledge companies are:

Partner with groups in Portland that can assist with hiring and career advancement for underrepresented communities;

Create and implement strategies to increase hiring of women and people of color, from intern programs to full-time positions at all levels within our organizations;

Provide internal development and progression programs, and ensure underrepresented employees can access these programs; and

Share our collective data on the demographic representation within our offices in the Portland metro area of gender and race.

We will create community benchmarks and release our progress in an annual report. Our baseline information is available at Portland Diversity Tech Survey.

To achieve these actions we are partnering with the Prosper Portland, the City of Portland, and Worksystems, Inc. Through this partnership, we will develop tools to foster an increasingly diverse and inclusive workforce. The coalition of companies listed below is just a start, and we invite you to join us.

If we are successful, our efforts will create a needed pool of talent for our industry and establish Portland as a place where everyone can have a fruitful career in technology. We have a long road ahead, but we are proud to be united to foster a more equitable and prosperous Portland.

Portland Tech Companies

Managing Organizations

Supporting Organizations

Pledge History & Progress

The pledge launched in June 2015 with programming starting in 2016. The initial year of programming is largely regarded as a success albeit incomplete. The program has been credited with creating needed energy, urgency and synergy around the topic of diversity in the Portland tech community.

In 2016, Prosper Portland and TechTown partnered with Design + Culture Lab and Scale Up Partners to evaluate the Diversity Pledge to better address the needs of the Diversity Pledge community with a second year of supportive programming.

The Pledge has seen success and progress on their 5 actions through the Unconscious Bias Workshop series, the Diversity and Inclusion Survey, live events at City Hall, new partnerships, and new strategies. This has lead to enhanced workplace inclusion and some improvements on workforce diversity within pledge companies.

In 2017, TechTownPDX merged existing outreach and inclusion actions with efforts of the public workforce system to support training and hiring strategies as encapsulated in the regional Talent Strategy Plan